Mr. Speaker, Canada faces a continuing youth jobs crisis. The government has, unfortunately, with this budget, actually moved in the opposite direction from where we need to go.
Before the budget, Conservatives helpfully laid out the Conservative youth jobs plan, which identifies the key things we need to do: unleash the economy, fix immigration, fix training and build homes where the jobs are. Key policies in these areas would help to create jobs and opportunity. They would help to address the issue of a poorly tailored immigration system leading to competition for entry-level jobs. They would help young people get skills that align with the needs of the labour market and enable them to move to where jobs are available in cases where there are geographical mismatches.
We need to unleash the economy, fix immigration, fix training and build homes where the jobs are, but rather than implement our plan, we saw a budget, particularly in the area of training, that goes in the opposite direction. The government has now decided to not give student grants to students on the basis of the institution they are going to, in particular to discriminate against students going to particular private institutions. I think students would not mind going to public institutions if all of the same programs and areas of vocational training were offered in public institutions as are available in private institutions.
However, the reality is that there are certain kinds of careers for which virtually all of the formation happens at private institutions. Targeting the students and not allowing those students to get grants means that students pursuing in-demand skills in certain vocational careers will no longer be able to access that funding. The budget also completely leaves behind polytechnics, where the vast majority of apprentices are trained.
We are seeing the government perpetuate this kind of discrimination, where it leans hard into saying the university sector is the only way and continues to leave further behind students who are interested in in-demand skills and vocations that involve career colleges, polytechnics and other areas.
We are already in a situation where there is a training mismatch, and the government's solution has been to say that if Canadian young people and the skills the labour market needs are not aligned, we are just going to have temporary foreign workers fill those gaps. What we need to do is support training for young people to acquire skills that align with the labour market, but this budget, by discriminating against students who go to certain kinds of institutions, is moving in the opposite direction.
We are going to be seeing new job numbers out very soon. The problem is that we have consistently had over 14% youth unemployment, recession levels of youth unemployment. At this point, we still have significantly higher youth unemployment than we had a year ago. Conservatives have put forward a constructive plan to address this. Liberals have refused to implement that plan and have actually gone in the opposite direction.
We are going to be seeing new job numbers tomorrow, and I want to ask the government very clearly, why is it moving in the opposite direction with training provisions in the budget? What is the rationale for discriminating against students who go to career colleges that are organized in this way? Why has the government failed to implement the constructive ideas that Conservatives have put forward to unleash the economy, to fix immigration, to fix training and to build homes where the jobs are?